Iwaki, Fukushima, Japan – Graduation day was sunny and beautiful at Toyoma Junior High, and the 47 members of the senior class were in a good mood. Just being at Toyoma Junior High was a day at the beach: the school overlooked Usuiso, one of Japan’s most popular coastal strips, and the dizzying humor was embodied in a blackboard message written: “Thank you for the last three years! It’s been fun. ”
In the gym, while watching teachers, families, and classmates, students in their navy uniforms sang the school song for the last time, accompanied, as always, by Toyoma’s fine grand piano.
Instead of the cheaper amounts normally bought by schools and parents, Toyoma was blessed with a high-performance Yamaha “C5” grand piano, gifted by a local seafood mogul whose granddaughter was a student.
For more than a decade, the piano provided the soundtrack for Toyoma Jr. High, serenading new students in April, accompanying school choirs and sending graduates every March.
After a morning of speeches and diplomas, the 2011 class came out into the world. They never imagined he was about to be turned upside down.
Disaster strikes
According to a local nonprofit group, a unit of the Land Self-Defense Force took two months to dig up the gym, the location on whose beach left it exposed to the fury of the devastating tsunami that crashed into it. the east coast of Japan. course.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
Fortunately the school does emptied a few hours before the 28-foot waves, leaving the gym clock frozen at 3:28; but more than 100 other residents of the Usuiso district would lose their lives.
As rescue workers crossed the wreckage to their knees, their commander suddenly noticed the grand piano in a corner of the stage, sadly lying beside him. The decision of the instrument may have sentimental value for local residents, Field Officer Isamu Yamaguchi he ordered his men to gently carry the sad shipwreck in the middle of the gym floor, where they used their bottles of drinking water to carefully clean the mud.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
Later, in an emotional gathering organized by the PTA, several hundred residents of the Usuiso district would gather around the now silent piano to sing the school a cappella song. The gym would be razed soon after.
But before that happened, Hiroshi Endo appeared.
“No time to be out”
If he had had his way, Endo would not have been near Fukushima at that time.
His Iwaki home and piano shop had escaped unscathed from the earthquake and tsunami, but then radiation levels rose after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant 30 miles north.
Terrified, he and his family fled 150 kilometers south to Chiba prefecture. But then the phone started ringing.
“A lot of customers contacted me to tell me their pianos had fallen (in the earthquake). I thought it wasn’t time to be out,” he told CBS News in his store. Despite serious suspicions, Endo returned.
He heard about the ruined piano sitting in the Toyoma Junior High gym, and curiosity won him over.
“The outside was pretty clean, but the inside was full of pork.” Insurmountable, he thought.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
But an inscription on the right side of the piano caught his eye: “Donated by Hiromatsu Shike, September 1999.” He realized that this was not a standard school recruitment, but tangible evidence of the spirit that united this community.
Chased by the discovery, ten days later he decided: he would try to make the piano sing again. After several months of bureaucracy with the school board, ownership of the £ 770 instrument was finally transferred to Endo.
You never rent a piano
“It smelled terrible back then,” he recalls. “Rot had been installed”. The ropes were rusty. Most of the keyboard had been booted and the few remaining keys made a strangled sound.
Inside, the piano was so full of sand that it looked like a sandbox. Endo’s two sons, also tuners and piano technicians, declared the instrument beyond savings.
With no idea where to start, Endo began disassembling the 10,000 components of the piano. He quickly determined that most hammers, shock absorbers, and other parts would have to be replaced at a cost of thousands of dollars, out of his own pocket.
He then had to figure out how to wash the instrument, a prospect that gave him agitation. “Usually water is the enemy of a piano,” he said. “You should May wash one “, but there was no other option.
Salt deposits had to be removed using a special cleaner. Throughout the fall of 2011, the Endo family struggled with the restoration.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
“We didn’t have confidence,” he said. “We had never tried to repair a piano shattered by a tsunami.”
“A ray of hope”
But as its thorough restoration spread, the weight of expectations grew. After all, it was still 2011 and the country continued to be deeply traumatized. A Tokyo television network, TBS, told Endo that they wanted what was now known as “Piano Miracle” to star in their Christmas Eve show, so the team ran to finish.
“People needed a ray of hope,” the soft-spoken piano technician said.
Endo can’t say if it sounds the same as before, but the musicians have praised the soft, smooth quality of the piano and its “warm” keyboard. Over the past decade, the Toyoma piano has traveled to dozens of cities, been played by pop and school stars, and has been heard as far as Taiwan and Singapore.
Courtesy of Hiroshi Endo
In one key aspect, the instrument remains unrepaired: the scratches and streaks caused by the tsunami that marked the piano’s shiny onyx finish were deliberately left intact, scars that move spectators to tears .
“A lot of people have played the piano and they said to me,‘ Endo-san, you’ve worked hard on the restoration, but this piano … really a lot happened, i held. “”
Looking around his small shop with piano blocks, evidence of his 40-year career making them whole again, the 62-year-old restaurateur seems to have a weak spot for falling instruments.
But in this case, the piano was almost off point. Endo was trying to repair the broken heart.
“Students had lost everything. Their school had disappeared, their relatives dead or injured. Children were emotionally affected more deeply by the disaster than adults,” he told CSB News. “We wanted to show them,‘ Look! We fix it! “Despite all the tragedy, there was one small thing that we re-normalized.”